Kanada 2

Vesna
Going over the bars

We have death caused by illness, probably breast cancer. Her cancer spread quickly to the vital organs,
lungs, liver, kidneys, She is fully aware of what is going to happen and there is nothing she can do
about it. We should though ask ourselves is there really nothing that can be done about this situation
at least we could think in a certain way, enter a certain state of mind when everything else seems to be
beyond our reach. Most people imagine death as a frightening experience. There is also a certain
attitude towards people who mourn. The attitude of our civilization towards death and mourning has
changed from the earliest times, in the times of deeper religious beliefs mourning was encouraged and
accepted, this was a ritual. Depart is the right word because the dying person is heading somewhere.
But in the modern times we see that somehow the attitude towards death and especially to mourning
has changed. Today, people arrive with cars to funerals, stay for a couple of minutes and then they are
all gone. We dont want to spend too much time with the person mourning, especially when it is still
fresh, it is somehow believe that it is not decent and that public display of emotions is not acceptable.
We said that death is experienced as scary and the frightening element about it is that one doesnt know
what to expect, fear of the unknown and the unknowable. It is possible that a dying person has that kind
of fear but it is questionable because when one gets that close to death, one cannot think that rationally
to be afraid of the unknown. Maybe there is something else that the dying person is afraid of. On one
hand you never have enough of life, people never feel like dying, even the people who have had the
worst experiences that one could possibly have in a lifetime, like losing children, are not prone to
committing suicide because according to the general belief when children die life loses all meaning. Life
is dear no matter how sick one is or how much it hurts to be alive. The other reason why a dying person
might be afraid of dying originates in the worry for the ones they leave behind. There is this sense of
responsibility, the dying person doesnt get to see their children grow and how they get on. The
difference between believers and non-believers is that the latter have a blank image of what comes
after death whereas the believers have a certain image of afterlife, and that image is only a reflection of
our hopes. We dont know whether at the moment of dying what happens is the complete obliteration
of all senses, experiences, hopes.
Death by breast cancer is not unusual at all but there is something that makes this particular dying
woman interesting. Judging by the number of great works of art she mentions, she might be a professor,
scholar, or an artist, she might even be just a well-read person who might have some menial job but is
interested in literature, particularly canonical English literature. There are many references and quotes
in the story. She has a husband and children, but her children dont visit her anymore, they are at their
aunts, they used to visit her , but they dont do that anymore probably because the father doesnt want
them to see their mother at the terminal stage of the disease, he doesnt want them to remember this,
although it may even be quite impossible for them to remember as they are four and two years old. If
they were allowed to see her they would just remember a white skeleton lying on a bed. This is not the
only thing though, the children are scared of this woman because she has changed so much. And her
psyche has also changed and the children can sense that, they realize that this is not the same person.
This doesnt mean that she doesnt love her children anymore, it just means that she doesnt have any
energy to act normal in front of her children. Her husband sits by the bed and holds her hand, and she is
wondering how he is not afraid that her bones will crack under his grip because she has dried up so
much that it is just bones thats left of her hand. She is aware of his presence but she doesnt
acknowledge it at all, not anymore, because she doesnt have any energy left for the things that happen
outside her body. In the terminal stage she is completely concentrated on herself, she has focused all of
her energy on breathing, at this point she is breathing consciously with effort. The ultimate goal in her
life right now is to keep breathing. Breathing hurts now because her lungs are affected by the disease.
Any distraction is too much, the children, the husband, even the smell of the flowers is not pleasant
anymore, but there is more to this the flowers are in vase so they are basically withering and her
heightened sensitivity can feel the energy that is leaving these flowers it is too much for her, even that
is a distraction. At this point she is concentrated upon herself. She uses all her energy to prolong her life.
She is reminding herself to breathe breathe in, breathe out. We have established that she is a well-
educated woman. What we dont know is how long she was fighting this disease if there were early
symptoms then it is probably a matter of years. We know from the story that she has had at least one
operation when her breasts were removed, after that she felt a bit better but then there was relapse. So
the struggle took at least some months. So this woman, in this agony, who doesnt have any energy left
still thinks in literary terms and she remembers of her childhood memories and thats what keeps her
going for some time until she finally dies. The childhood memory consists of swinging in a park, it is a
recurrent memory now. She is sitting on a swing and enjoying it very much. She had long hair which was
brushing the ground as she was swinging, that is a special feeling for her. At this moment she is thirty, so
she is still very young and her hair is still long, and she imagines swinging on this swing and feeling her
hair brushing the ground and she has this wonderful feeling, she is happy and she is free. But she is not
completely free while swinging because there is the bar, complete freedom would be to go over the bar
and make a full circle. She has never done that when she was a girl she was never brave enough. The
parents always scare their children with the possible scenarios such as falling down, breaking bones,
losing teeth, They dont let them do things which make them really feel alive. There is also another
reason why she never did it the parents say dont do that so she is a person who respects the
authorities and she has something like a fear of embarrassment that if she went over the bars
something would happen and she would draw the attention of all the grown-ups. She would do the
improper thing, going over the bars is not something that nice children do. And this becomes a pattern
there are things that we are not supposed to do, because the majority says we shouldnt and because
there are consequences if we do. But in spite of this there is the regret about her never going over the
bars and experiencing this feeling of complete freedom. And now that she is in hospital she constantly
remembers this situation when she was swinging in the park and she imagines the swing going higher
and higher. She dreads coming closer to the bar, the moment when she reaches the bars and when she
may go over the bars. In her mind that is related to the moment of dying. And that is why swinging is
harmonized with breathing in, out and in her mind she sees this movement of the swing like a
pendulum. If we follow this formula then the moment of death becomes the moment of absolute
freedom. Experiencing the freedom which was never experienced in life which probably dying brings.
The absurdity of cancer is that it kills that body that it lives in, it is a sort of suicide, basically the body is
killing itself. The cancer cells replicate so quickly that they can possess the whole organism. These cells
are hungry for life because replication actually is one of the mechanisms for supporting life. We dont
know the name of the dying woman so her case is generic, she stands for the whole human kind. Her
first response is the refusal to surrender. In the beginning when she realized that she was sick she tried
to fight it, she tried to take the positive stand. So first she was positive, she was ready to do anything to
overcome the disease. After this stage failed, she started negotiating with her cancer cells telling them
that they shouldnt bite the hand that feeds them, she literally talks to the cancer cells trying to talk
some sense into them. Unfortunately this doesnt work either so that she is sent to hospital, her breasts
were removed and she thought it was the end of this agony. When after that the situation again got
worse she felt anger and was in denial, the last stage is acceptance and surrender. Only when she
accepts the situation does she become capable of letting go, it is the moment when she goes over the
bars, and feels free.
The first literary reference that she makes is Oh I do think its the pleasantest thing / Ever a child can
do. It is a quote from a nursery rhyme by Robert Louis Stevenson who writes for children.
HOW do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!


Up in the air and over the wall, 5
Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside


Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown 10
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

This seems to be an ordinary simple nursery song which it is, but very often as in fairy tales these simple
rhymes contain the wisdom of life that you go up and then you have to go down. Your whole life is this
struggle to go up which ends in going down. It might be a coincidence that at this moment when she is
dying and thinking of swinging she remembers the words of this nursery rhyme but then of course it
makes a lot of sense because it also in a way deals with death.

Another quote Ellen went widdershins around a church, and no one caught sight of her again on
Gods good earth. it is taken from Childe Roland. In the ancient folklore of pagan Britain, to go
widdershins was to walk around an object counter-clockwise. In a magical sense it was to walk against
the light, or in the opposite way to the movement of the sun, making it an act contrary to God. To go
widdershins while reading prayers backwards was considered to be a way of connecting with the devil.
The vVictorians, in 19
th
century England, revived a lot of the pagan myths and folk stories as so-called
fairy tales. One folklorist was Joseph Jacobs and one of his best known fairy tales is Childe Rowland that
clearly explains the consequences of going widdershins. Rowland and his leder brothers lose their sister,
Burd Ellen, when she disappears after chasing their football around a church. Rowland seeking an
explanation goes to the Warlock Merlin who tells him that she must have been carried off by the
fairies, because she went round the church widdershins the opposite way to the sun. Childe Rowland,
after both his brothers fail, rescues his sister. The story ends with: And they reached home, and the
good queen, their mother, and Burd Ellen never went round a church widdershins again. So this Burd
Ellen did the forbidden thing, she went round the church widdershins and she disappeared, and here we
have the dying woman who else feels like doing something that is forbidden, going over the bars. At that
moment she remembers this old story that was told to her when she was a girl and she restrains herself
because of this fear that was bred into the new generations over and over again.

There is another quote Exterminate all the brutes! Mr. Kurtz says this, the brutes are the savages,
African indigenous people, in the heart of darkness Kurtz, such a civilized man becomes a savage. In the
story the savages are the cancer cells, and now she wants to destroy all these savages because they
changed her, like the savages changed Kurtz. He lost his moral compass, not that he forgot it but he
indulged in activities previously prohibited by the society. The worst in him, the potential for evil came
to surface now when there was no social control imposed by the civilized society. By saying that all the
brutes should be exterminated he desperately cries over himself because he realizes that there is
nothing he can do about himself anymore and that is how he will die. But here in the story there are the
cancer cells that destroy the body.

Once out of nature I will never take / My bodily form from any living thing. Sailing to Byzantium, W.B.
Yeats

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing;
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

She recognizes her own situation in all these literary references. He is talking about what is past or
passing or to come.

All are punished. Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
Another reference to all her bodily cells being punished by cancer cells.

There is also the mention of Heathcliff and Catherine from the Wuthering Heights. There is also Goethe
more light. These are Goethe last words. This is the idea that the dying person should think of
something memorable to pass onto the following generations.

In the last scene her husband is there, holding her hand, unable to comfort her, and though she doesnt
have any energy left she would still like to explain to him what it feels like to be dying. She uses the
expression of being in between life and death It is something like looking at colour transparencies
whose outlines havent quite meshed so there is a gap between the place where the line is drawn and
the colour begins. A little gap formed between the colour and the line and she sees this gap as
something significant, certainly not an abyss but just some unexpected space to slip through.
Symbolically she sees this as the only space that is left to a dying person. This act of going over the bars
is like going through this space. The line could be the life, the form that life takes, the colour inside could
be the meaning, the two should coincide for life to be meaningful. And she sees this space in between
the two as the necessity of dying. She is lying in bed and she is looking at the ceiling, and in the ceiling
there are all those little cracks and to her its like a universe, so she is watching that and she can see
everything now, in other words her life gets meaning. She can see everything now; the cracked ceiling
over her head pulls back, like flesh from the sides of a wound. It shows whatever it is that lies in the gap
between outline and colour. it shows the unknowable. When she is swinging she is looking upside
down and she sees the earth as the sky and the rocks as the stars in the story Unless the eye catch fire
there is another woman dying and in the last moments of her life she is looking through a tiny space in
her window pane looking outside and she has exactly the same feeling that this is a small gap which
opens for her and becomes so big that a ship could pass through. And there is this idea that we are
one with the starry heavens and our bodies are stars like the rocks and the earth, now our bodies are
stars, inner and outer are the same, the colour and the border line, the shape and the colour merge. The
water in the locks is level, we rise to a higher level, we move to a higher water, a high sea, a ship could
pass through, it is the moment when life gets absolute meaning which happens at the moment of dying.
Vesna ocigledno hoce da povezemo ova dva iskustva poslednjih trenutaka zivota, al mi nije bas jasno
kakve je paralele ovde povukla I na koji je nacin ovo povezano, ovo je sve sto je rekla

Milena
Going over the Bars

The technique used in the story is the stream of consciousness technique basically we get into the
head of a dying person who is probably losing her consciousness because of the various stages of the
disease. This technique is used here for the sake of evocation of some of the childhood memories. It
seems that there are various versions of what happens with the body and the soul, there is the question
of afterlife. Various versions of what happens after death can be found in the story. The technique is
used to evoke the childhood memories and bring them to the present so as to make the present
moment more meaningful and maybe better for understanding, because it seems that nothing makes
sense anymore. This is a young woman, her name is not given so obviously this is not just a personal
crisis, she cannot control it, it could strike anyone. She is a representative of the human kind. So there is
no meaning and there is no certainty, all the ideas that we have believed once they do not offer any
sense of security anymore. This young woman is an intellectual we know because of the numerous
references to books and classical music for example Bach. An intellectual striving for the sense of
meaning and security in her life. It seems that at one moment in her adult life she was actually above all
the fears that troubled her when she was a young girl. We can talk about the fears that troubled her and
since she is not given a name here it means that these fears troubled all of us when we were kids. We
can talk about that based on her memory. Usually a person before death can glimpse into all the things
that happened to them since their childhood. The fear she had as a child was the fear of going over the
bars related to swinging. She remembers her hair brushing the ground. She never did go over the bars
because her parents told her not to do so and they were the authority, it was considered dangerous, she
was afraid of it. There was this option of going over the bars or entering the realm of the unknown it
would be similar to going widdershins to relate it to Childe Rowland. The other world that exists as
parallel to this one, the fear is that she would never be able to come back from it, it is the fear of the
unknown which in her mature years was define as the fear of death or what happens after the soul
leaves the body. She remembers and she even recreates the song that she used to sing when she was a
child it is titled the swing by Robert Louis Stevenson and it talks about what happens when a person
goes over the bars. This story, the story Here and Now and Unless the eye catch fire all deal with the
theme of death and dying and this is probably or exam question. They show different attitudes toward
death. And here and now again there is an intellectual, a professor at a university, in this story she
reacts to the problem of death she wants to evade it, to prolong the blissful unawareness of death, the
state of ignorance by simply referring to the idea that in Canada it was still Sunday and not Monday
because on Monday in Australia her mother died. The first response towards death and dying although
it comes from an intellectual is to prolong the unawareness. In this story we have a woman, an
intellectual who is aware of the fact that she is going to die. When she grew up she forgot all about the
childhood fears crossing the bars entering the realm of the unknown and now that she is suffering from
this disease she is wondering whether she is going to experience this in a proper way as if there was a
proper way of dying and one of the ideas is to die with dignity. And if there is a public around her, her
final words would be from the Wuthering Heights I am comparably above and beyond you all
referring to her illness, so she is going to go with dignity to her death. She thinks that death is not going
to be absence but a gap. At one point in the story she is clinging to the idea that she is going to continue
living through her children, the first idea is this recreation of childhood going back to childhood, then
she has these memories of her life as a married woman, her children, the idea how her daughters are
going to memorize her, what is she going to represent for them because they are so young and maybe
they wont be able to remember their mother the way she would want them to remember her. We can
see her way of fighting the illness and there are certain stages apart from home vs hospital. At one point
even home cannot, which is regarded as a symbol of security, provide security, she feels trapped, she
cannot escape the disease. The place doesnt make any difference in the struggle against the disease,
maybe it is more difficult in the hospital because she is not surrounded with the people she knows,
friends and family but at one point all of this doesnt matter anymore because she cannot fight
anymore. The idea of death is best presented through these stages in her disease. She says at one point
that death may be an accomplishment of which we are all capable, dying is another matter, it is the loss
of control. And this is the idea that she cannot tolerate, the loss of control. It means that there is not
certainty in life, and although she was trying to create this image of safety and security at least for her
children in her adulthood, she finally suffers from this idea that death is loss of control and there is
nothing dignified and noble about it, nista ne vredi sad sve ono sto je citala sva ta verovanja ideali I
principi. Dying here is just a loss of control.

At first she dismissed the rebellious cells, Im not giving an inch, but an invading army my body has
simply stopped talking to me.

These are the four stages that she talks about the first stage is the stage of a rebel, fighter a winner. At
this first stage she experiences death as an intellectual, everything has to be based on certain logical
conclusions, the reasons that she has for her attitude. In this first phase she is a fighter. She is not going
to let these bad cells to invade her, this is her reason talking. And everyone applauds her spirit because
this is the person they are used to, shes been a fighter her whole life. But this attitude wont do, what
happens next is that she tries to reason with the cells, she is lecturing them dont bite the hand that
feeds you she tried to reason with them the way she would probably lecture her children. But reason
wont do. In the third phase she realizes that reason wont do, she is seen as a city under siege, she will
do whatever is necessary in order to defy them - we have a direct reference to the radiation she is
exposed to, this is her will to do whatever is necessary to remove the bad cells that corrupt her. The last
stage is an absolute loss of control, whatever she does is meaningless, she is going to die. She has to
face this and accept it, her body is committing suicide and she doesnt get any say in the matter. This is
that tortures much more than the fact that she is going to die I have nothing to say in this matter, my
body has simply stopped talking to me there is this feeling of helplessness. A young intellectual whos
done everything by the book, successful, marriage, family, degree, and now this is something that
appears quite unexpectedly and nothing can be done about it. The first idea she has is the idea of
dignified and noble death but then she realizes that there is nothing dignified in that way of dying.
Especially because she is young and she has children. At one point she said that knowing that she was
going to die didnt bring her peace, that was the only certainty that she could hold onto but that
certainty did not bring peace. Her dying brought no revelation only confirmation of obscurity, so it is
meaningless, her death brought no meaning, why was she alive at all? There are some stereotypes
about death in the story, the swing wavering about death and life, darkness, going over the bars, closing
eyes, the flowers withering, trees in winter like skeletons but there is no the implication that her body is
going to recuperate as happens with trees in spring. There is this stereotypical image of death with the
scythe and the maiden, and then she says that the reason why she doesnt see death with the scythe
coming for her is because she is not a maiden anymore, she gave birth to two children. The she clings to
the Christian version of afterlife do we at least get the afterlife we desire or does it depend on
whether we perform our death the way we should, she thinks that if we perform this death in a dignified
manner maybe she will be rewarded with an afterlife. She is as nervous as when taking off all her clothes
for her lover, but it is simple she just has to assume transparency, her soul will weigh no more than a
scrap of cellophane so she clings to the Christian version. But at one point she also mentions
metempsychosis Once out of nature I will never take / My bodily form from any living thing. Sailing
to Byzantium, W.B. Yeats and then she says what made the poet think hed be given any say in the
matter? Metempsychosis is the pagan idea that your soul after death enters a body of an animal or
another human being. So as a young intellectual she is quite aware of these different versions of what
happens to you after death. But all of these theories offer her no security and peace. Even the idea of
being noble at the moment of death doesnt help, because after awhile as her disease progresses she
realizes that it is impossible to die dignified. So through this idea of metempsychosis she is hoping to live
through children, death is like a physical gap, I am physically not present but I am going to continue my
life through the lives of my children.

And then there are allusions to the various theories of death and afterlife. At one point after operation
she says that she is going to stay home and listen to Bach, read Dante (because of the divine comedy),
he wrote about hell and purgatory. Bach composed prayer music. She was hoping to find some meaning
there. But the bottom line is that everything meaningless, she is helpless. The kids are afraid of her, and
her husband cannot perceive the truth because he is experiencing the beloved one dying. He is hoping
that somehow she is going to recover, he was quite confident in his belief that she wasnt going to die,
but after all, she says, he wasnt dying. Up to that moment they were sharing their lives but from that
moment on they were totally split apart, he couldnt understand that. We can draw a parallel here with
the story Here and Now where there is Walter the father who is mourning his son. And by the way we
could link these stories through the perspective of the mourners.

Incomparably above and beyond all she is actually preparing for the final moment, she is to say
something if her voice doesnt give in on her. Such things happen everyone dies alone, though some
are fortunate to have an audience. All are punished the good and the bad cells. At the moment of
death Swinging back and forth, higher and higher, Over the bars Now if this passage was given for
the exam what would we say this is the moment of her death, all the images and memories are
somehow fused together, she can see everything now (ceo zivot joj prolazi pred ocima) The writer of
the story cannot know what had happened to the dying woman in the moment of death, so she ends
the story with the stereotypical idea that her life is flashing before her eyes, all emotions and memories
in that short moment when life is lost. It is a stereotypical representation death. Going over the bars is
the liberation, she reaches the freedom, the unknown of which she was afraid, and she was also afraid
of the authority, her parents who told her not to go over. So she clings to life with all her effort and
finally when there is no more energy she lets go and she is not afraid anymore. So she is finally ready to
cross to the other side. Over the bars and there is no any punctuation mark after it, and on purpose,
because we dont know what happens after going over the bars, maybe this is an attitude of the author
that crossing over the bar is not the end.